Product design is the process of creating a new product (i.e., an item that can be offered to a market to satisfy a want or need) to be sold by a business to its customers. Thus, product design broadly involves the generation and development of ideas through a process that leads to new products. The new products may be designed to respond to a stated design objective (e.g., desired feature or intended use) and/or “seed” (e.g., constraint or inspirational starting point).
Conventionally, product design is a human-driven process. That is, the process relies on human product designers to conceptualize and evaluate ideas and turn them into tangible products. Although tools have been developed to relieve product designers of some of these tasks, there are no known tools that can autonomously generate ideas for new products without human assistance.